Apple just erased the borders between its devices at WWDC

IDG News Service | Jun 13, 2016

Siri is coming to the desktop, Apple Pay will work in Safari, and you can easily copy text and share it between your Mac and iPhone — that’s just some of the news Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco Monday.

It’s WWDC time and that means a bunch of updates from Apple on its mac, iPhone, TV and watch platforms. A big focus this year is tying them all together through something it calls continuity.

So there’s now a universal clipboard. Copy something on your desktop and it’s available in your phone’s clipboard – no more emailing notes and addresses to yourself.

And Apple Pay is making the jump from the phone to the desktop.

“So now, when you’re shopping online, you’ll have a pay with ApplePay button available to you. When you click it, a sheet comes down that actually prompts you to securely authenticate your purchase using continuity right on your iPhone with touch ID and of course this works with your Applewatch as well so you can authenticate with just a tap on your wrist.”

Track 3: Also big on the continuity front: iCloud drive, which makes the contents of your entire desktop from your mac available across other OS devices.

“For 30 years now we’ve all learned to do the work, things we are working on right now, well where do we put those? So often it’s on our desktop. So let’s make our desktop available on our other macs as well, and have to docs be available to us on the go on our iPhones. Now you can.”

Other big news from Apple…huge improvements to the Applewatch with faster app launch times, background refresh of your favorite apps, and more sophisticated watch faces. The watch will now also support an S-O-S function that will allow you to call emergency services by pressing the side button for 3 seconds. Also coming to the Applewatch…a deep breathing app to help you deal with all the Apple excitement.

Who’s there? Siri?…Ah yes I almost forgot! Siri is coming to OS!

“Hi it’s me. It sure is great to be on the Mac. How about a demo?”

“How do you like being on a Mac?” “Pretty awesome, lots of space, aluminum uni-body walls and I have no complaint about the lack of windows.”

Developers are getting access to a lot of these new features including apple maps, messages, and you guessed it…Siri.

“Siri services over 2 billion requests a week from customers. There are so many things that you can ask Siri, but now in iOS 10, Siri is going to be able to do so much more because we are opening Siri up to developers.”

Ughh I forgot my password again! Now I’ll never catch up with my game of Thrones!

Luckily Apple is coming to my rescue with “single sign-on.” It’s a universal code authentication feature for all pay-TV video channels on the AppleTv. “Auto unlock” is another feature which will save users the pain of remembering yet another password by allowing users to unlock their mac using Apple watch.

“For many of us we already have an authentication device that is secured to our wrists. That already knows who we are and could tell our Mac. And so then we open our Mac it could be a little bit more like this. And we’re in.”

Developers have access to many of these features now. The rest of us will have to wait until the fall.